Wow, I actually got so emotionally involved in an auction on ebay that I totally forgot how the rules went. What seemed to me to be a situation wherein another bidder must have known my max bid (allowing him to put in a single winning bid of a single dollar more than my hidden maximum bid, 5 seconds before the auction ended) was in fact simply a situation where that other bidder must have been super-rich and simply put in a maximum bid for, say, a million dollars, knowing that the ebay system would simpy meet my maximum bid and best it by a dollar.

That’s a technique I’ve never used, since I’m not rich. It never occured to me to simply enter an insane amount and trust that whatever the other bidder was bidding, that it wouldn’t be anything I couldn’t handle. (For a person who is not rich, the way to explore an opponent’s maximum bid is to keep placing bids, each a little bid more than the next, until you either best them or decide you can’t continue on).

The rich…fuck ’em.

The item (sob) was a poster I’ve been hunting for about two years. It has only come to auction twice in that time, and I really thought I had it. But, I got sniped. I think I got emotionally invested in it because I thought that I was perhaps the only person who knew that poster even existed. It doesn’t even have the name of the film on it, so it is the kind of item that a movie poster dealer, if they found it rolled up in their back room, might not even know what it is or how to list it. It was destined to be obscure. But I knew what it was. So did this particular seller, fortunately. So did that other bidder, unfortunately.